After the Overlord's Fall
by Sir Floopy
Summary: Former Alliance Commander and Cerberus Captain, Lucas Parada Shepard, struggles to cope with the moral dilemma of shutting down Project Overlord during the events of ME2, saving David Archer at the potential cost of thousands of casualties in the Geth war. As always, the Normandy's resident psychologist is there to help. One-shot, and my first-ever fanfic.
**Shepard and Kelly, Post-Overlord Mission**

Yeoman Kelly Chambers had seen Shepard return from almost every mission the _Normandy_ SR-2's crew had undertaken. Most often he looked either exhausted, irritated, or grimly satisfied. It was up to Kelly to monitor his mental state, and she did an informal debriefing with him after every mission. Usually, by the time he'd made it back to the _Normandy_ and stowed his weapons in the armory, he was calm and collected, no matter what had occurred groundside. But today, he was _furious_. Everyone else on the ground team gave him a wide berth as they stepped out of the shuttle, some lightly wounded, some splattered with the telltale, white hydraulic fluid of Geth combat platforms. Kelly was usually in the cargo bay to greet the ground team, waiting just behind an airtight partition.

But today Shepard didn't even acknowledge the bubbly redhead's presence, striding right past her to the elevator, pulling off his helmet as he did. She followed, not willing to let him get away. He stared straight at the wall in front of them, actually trembling with anger. Kelly knew she had to be cautious. But she also knew that above all else, Lucas Shepard preferred direct questions and honest answers. She turned to face him, concern writ clearly on her kind face.

"Lucas, do you want to talk about what happened?"

He simply shook his head, and said, almost sadly. "Not yet."

She nodded, keeping a respectful silence as the elevator deposited them in the CIC, and he cleared and checked all of his weapons. After he changed out of his armor into Cerberus CCU fatigues and finally put his last weapon, his Vindicator battle rifle, back in his locker, he slammed the door shut and walked in silence to the comm room. Kelly held back, not wanting to go in blind. The rest of the ground team had come up in the elevator, and she asked them, "What happened down there?"

The group was silent, all of them looking unsettled, angry, or revolted themselves. Even Tali'Zorah, her face obscured behind the tinted mask of her environmental suit, projected sadness and disgust through her body language. She sighed and took a different approach. "Please, he won't let anyone see the mission report, and he wouldn't tell me anything in person."

Miranda spoke up, looking the least upset by recent events. Her beautiful features were obscured by soot, scrapes and cuts, and a medigel-infused bandage over one cheek, long black hair disheveled and streaked with more soot, still drawn into a military bun to fit inside her now-shattered helmet. "I'm sorry, Yeoman Chambers. But he trusts us to keep our silence. I'm not going to break that trust."

Kelly's eyes flashed slightly. "Operative Lawson, I need you to help me, so I can help him." She paused, and added in a colder voice, "If Shepard isn't psychologically sound, the mission is at risk."

Miranda shook her head, with a small, sad smile. "I know that. He knows that. He requested that if anyone talked about what he found, it would be him, and only him." She looked at the floor in front of Kelly. "We owe him that much." She looked back up, her tone businesslike. "I think he _will_ tell you, just not necessarily right away." With that, she stepped into the lab to speak with Mordin, and the rest of the ground team simply walked off to the armory to stow their own equipment, still silent.

Kelly scowled, reminded once again that the galaxy's deadliest killers weren't usually well-adjusted, mentally sound people. She walked into the comm room, to see Shepard lying on the brushed-metal table, eyes closed, with his hands forming a mask over his mouth and nose, partly obscuring the long knife scar running down from his temple to his left cheek. His eyes snapped open and he sat up as the heavy door slid shut behind her, hard, angular features still twisted with rage.

Kelly forced herself not to give a comforting smile, since he could see right through those, and asked him again. "Do you want to talk about what happened?"

He clenched his fists. "Not here for once. I need to…" His face relaxed a bit. "Follow me." He twisted up and off the table, taking long, purposeful strides back to the elevator, and she followed, apprehensive. They went back down to the cargo bay, now repressurized, and Lucas walked over to the "punching bag", a hollow steel cylinder hanging in a corner of the bay, covered in Kevlar, which he used to train his cybernetic muscles and practice hand-to-hand combat.

As Lucas' arm flashed out impossibly fast, denting the bullet-resistant fabric, he grunted and said. "Alright, Doc. Now I'm ready to talk about it." He punched again, sending the heavy target swinging on its metal chain.

Kelly collected herself. "Well, to start, tell me what happened. Maybe you can make sense of it that way."

And so Shepard recounted the long mission on Aite, from the beginning, to the point when he shut down the rogue VI's core, punching and kicking intermittently. He told her about Dr. Archer and his brother, how Archer had forced his brother to become a lab rat for Project Overlord, how the hybrid Virtual Intelligence had taken control of his cybernetic body, and how he had stopped it from uploading itself offworld. While he talked, Kelly listened, always patient, never judging, her few questions always constructive or illuminating.

She had realized early in the conversation that, whatever it was that made him so angry, it had occurred at the end of the mission. With only a moment of hesitation, she posed the logical next question. "What happened once you disabled the VI's core?"

He didn't answer for a moment, kicking the Kevlar-encased target so hard that part of it crumpled like a can of cheap cola. "Well, I found out what exactly had happened to David."

Kelly was quite worried now. "You said Dr. Archer lied to you, and you saw it from the project logs you found; what did they do to him?"

Shepard shook his head, pausing his abuse of the target to rub his hands over his face, with a weariness that transcended physical exhaustion. "It was like his brother told me; he was interfaced with a Geth network hub. But as I said, he hadn't volunteered." He looked at the floor, his voice growing quiet. "He'd been forced into this… thing. Wires and tubes and probes everywhere, with a sort of cage, around his head and neck, metal spikes in his spine, and restraints all over him. He looked like… me. During the reconstruction, I mean, from the vids you showed me. Except _he_ was conscious, and fully aware of what was happening. The whole time I was fighting the Geth platforms, I could hear it… him… screaming for it all to stop."

He stared at his hands, keenly aware of the slight mechanical whirring sound as they moved. His voice grew hard. "Dr. Archer had already told me David was severely autistic; all the mental noise, a million Geth runtimes communicating at once, and he could hear it all. It… It would be like… constant gunfire, or, I don't know, chainsaws, or scraping pieces of glass, in his head, _all the time_. Not to mention all the shit that was attached to him. I don't know how long it went on before we got there, and I don't know if he'll ever have any chance of recovery."

He punched the target again, leaving another sizeable dent. His voice hardened further. "His brother wanted to continue the project. Said they'd made huge breakthroughs on the Geth, how they work, how they could possibly be controlled." He looked directly at Kelly. "So I listened, and I thought about what he was saying, and… he had a point." Something came over his face that Kelly, and everyone else for that matter, almost never saw.

Conflict. Lucas Shepard was always sure of himself, or at least he always projected this impression to keep his squad and crew motivated. But he had done something today that would likely haunt him for the rest of his life.

Kelly was straightforward, "leaning into the pain", as Lucas himself called it. "What did you do?" He continued to pound away at the already-dented target.

"I heard him out. And I thought about it. For quite a long time. I held Dr. Archer at gunpoint in case I decided he was too dangerous to live; he held David at gunpoint in case the VI interface came back online. And I mulled it over."

He fell silent, except for more grunts as he continued punching and kicking, and Kelly interjected, "What do you think made you indecisive?"

He shook his head with a look of disgust. "The moral dilemma of it all. Save David, someone like me, from the project, and we lose any more potential progress against the Geth, and who knows how many lives if they attack again. Leave him there to help against the Geth, and a complete innocent endures the worst kind of torment possible for his psychology, the whole thing is being inflicted by his own brother, and I walk away knowing I let it happen."

Lucas kept up his barrage against the target in front of him. Kelly was disturbed herself at this point, but didn't show it, pressing onward. "So what did you do?"

He delivered another punch. "I freed David and took him with us. I shut down Project Overlord and told his brother that I'd be forced to kill him if he tried to stop me. I said that the Illusive Man could fire me if he has a problem with it." He stopped his attacks as he turned to look right at Kelly again. "And now how many people will die because I stopped the research?" He lashed out with a kick from his right leg, which he followed up with a punch from his left arm, bouncing the target back and forth like a pinball. "How much more will we lose, because I decided one person was more important than preparing for another galactic war?"

Kelly's voice hardened somewhat. "Lucas, you've said it yourself. True soldiers make the calls that nobody else wants to make. It sounds to me like you made the most of two horrible choices."

He scowled, lashing out with a flurry of punches. "Two choices that shouldn't have existed in the first place. Why, Kelly?" He stared at the floor again. "Why is it me, who decides this? What did I do to deserve this?" He slammed both fists into the target.

He glared at the wall across from him, a dark gray panel with the Cerberus logo emblazoned on it. "I should be dead right now. I was done. No more fighting, no more bleeding for corrupt politicians and blind weaklings, no more watching my soldiers die for people who would never know their names, or give two shits about their sacrifice."

He let loose with a blinding flurry of punches, buckling the Kevlar and drawing blood from his knuckles. "But no. Our big Man With A Plan decides I can't die, so now here I am, fighting once more. And people are throwing all their tough decisions at me again."

He looked back at the Cerberus logo on the wall. "Nobody asked my opinion on becoming an undead killing machine. I'm dead, floating off into deep space, thinking I just helped save the galaxy, and then suddenly I'm alive again, and someone else needs my hanta-shitting _help_. And here I am, giving my help again, not because it's the right thing to do, or because I have a cause that I think is worth fighting for, but just because I don't know what else to do with myself, and there's some tiny chance that a few of us might actually survive when the Reapers come."

He paused on his punches, looking over all the deformations he'd made in his hardened target. "I'm a speck of dust, lost in space. Nobody should be asking my opinion on anything, and I shouldn't even be alive anymore."

She shifted to an aggressive stance, folding her arms and leaning forward, to which he usually responded well when he felt conflicted. "The Illusive Man is right about you, Lucas. You've always been willing to make the hard choices when nobody else will. It's a terrible burden to bear, but we're with you all the way. Small comfort, I know, but we'll do whatever we can."

Lucas finally stopped his assault on the Kevlar-encased cylinder, letting his hands fall limp to his sides as he sat on the floor, cross-legged. His voice was quiet, but bitter. "What does one life really matter, when the Reapers are on their way? What was I thinking? That somehow the universe would reward my upstanding behavior by making the Geth stop fighting, and give everyone hugs and free candy? That the people of Citadel space will be happy when they lose half a _generation_ of soldiers, all because I felt sorry for a single man in pain?"

Kelly's voice remained hard, trying to snap him out of that line of thought. "What's done is done, _Spectre_ , and everyone on this ship will stand behind you. We've all known that finishing the war with the Geth will be costly, but it sounds to me like the remaining project data will be an enormous help anyway."

Shepard waved his hand in the air, as if tossing away as piece of trash. "But Archer told and showed me himself: Before David went rogue, they could control every Geth on their local network. An entire dreadnought's worth of runtimes and mobile platforms. A _dreadnought_. Completely under organic control. _Our_ control. How much damage can a Geth dreadnought do before it's taken out?" He flexed his left hand, wiggling the fingers and curling them into a fist, still able to hear the whirring of the motors and artificial muscles. "They could have taken all that firepower, and not just shut it down, but _used_ it. How long would Sovereign have lasted if all of its thralls had turned on it? There might not have _been_ a war, Kelly."

She could sense he had more to say, and remained silent and blank-faced.

"But no, the great Hero of the Citadel, in all his wisdom, takes pity on some poor autistic guy with an abusive brother, and now thousands more are going to die fighting an enemy that could've been reprogrammed to fight for us."

Kelly uncrossed her arms and sat down next to him, also cross-legged, copying his stance to subconsciously put him at ease. "You don't know that, Lucas. If David's VI went rogue once, who's to say it wouldn't happen again? Or that it would stay contained in an isolated research facility this time around? The Overlord team was playing with fire, and they got burned. Maybe organics just can't stand up to the influence of the Geth Consensus."

She scooted around to look directly at him. "Maybe the project was always going to fail, no matter what. It sounds to me like you did what you thought was right, and you're not considering all the potential dangers you avoided."

He shook his head. "No, I had plenty of time to consider all of that. But at the end of the day, I know _why_ I did what I did. And it was weak. If you've got your enemy on the floor, you're unarmed, and their gun's fallen out of their hands, you grab it, and blow their head off. What does it matter if it's the same gun that killed your family, or if it's designed to burn its target alive? You use it, so those who come after you don't have to."

Kelly had to approach her response carefully. "You know, the Illusive Man wanted you to act as a counterbalance, to some degree. He realizes how ruthless he is, and while he knows you're a skilled soldier, I also think he _wanted_ you to contradict him sometimes, To remind him that sometimes we can stray so far from being human, just to survive, that what's left at the end isn't worth keeping. That there _are_ worse things than death. He wants you to help stop the Reapers, Shepard. And at this point, I think you just might pull it off. But if we start things like Project Overlord without questioning them, we're no better than machines."

He looked up, his expression torn between anger and amusement. "I _am_ a machine, Kelly. Yesterday I literally detached my own right arm for maintenance, adjusted and calibrated it like I would a rifle, and reattached it as easily as putting a screw in its socket. And I'm a clinically tested schizoid personality type with a love of killing, not some paragon of justice and peace. And I don't want to be the great arbiter of morality. If I did, the Spectres never would have accepted me."

Kelly nodded, and picked at the edges of the metal floor grating as she talked. "I don't think anyone would envy your position if they had to fill it themselves, Spectre. But this isn't a cut-and-dry decision you made today. There are moral and practical arguments that can be made for both sides, and there are going to be casualties no matter what you choose. We'll pass the project data to Cerberus command, and probably to the Council and the other governments as well. Regardless of whatever else we might have gotten out of the project, you've done a great thing. An innocent man is now safe from a terrible fate, a literal 'technological apocalypse,' as Dr. Archer put it, has been averted, and we know far more about the Geth than we did before. Thanks to you."

Lucas grunted. "Yeah, great. Lives saved, military assets recovered, all that ratshit. But unless David Archer can somehow talk down the Reapers too, it doesn't really make that much of a difference."

Kelly held out a closed fist in front of her, as was their established custom. "You did well, Lucas. I probably would've done the same thing in your position." She smiled. "And with you around, I'm not sure we have to worry about the Geth or the Reapers. After all, we have a Terminator now."

He chuckled, and extended his own hand, bumping fists. "Alright, let's get back to it. What was that, a whole ten minutes? Grunt's probably eaten one of the crew or something by now." He started to walk back towards the elevator. She followed, not too closely, but to the side, where she was visible, just so he knew she was still there. Whether human, machine, or something in between, Lucas Shepard could still appreciate a simple act of friendship and support. Sometimes just being there, to talk and make sense of things, was all a person really needed.


End file.
